The next season of Destiny 2 is just around the corner, and given that it precedes what’s to come in the next major expansion, The Witch Queen, Bungie hasn’t revealed much about it quite yet. However, some Destiny fans have discovered evidence that points to Bungie making a pretty enormous change to the Destiny 2 ammo economy next season: infinite primary ammo.
Ammo currently comes in three types:
- Primary – White Bricks – Used for primary weapons like Auto Rifles, Scout Rifles, Hand Cannons, and Sidearms.
- Special – Green Bricks – Used for more powerful special weapons like Shotguns, Fusion Rifles, and Snipers.
- Heavy – Purple Bricks – Used for the most powerful heavy weapons like Rocket Launchers, Machine Guns, and Swords.
The ammo economy as it exists in Destiny 2 today is designed to more or less keep your Primary weapons loaded up no matter what, while Special and Heavy should both be a little bit more rare (or require speccing into in order to get more ammo for these more powerful weapon types). In other words, your Primary weapon should be, well, your primary weapon.
It’s rare, but there are times when players will run out of Primary ammo. Whether it’s a lack of primary ammo bricks, or just dumping bullets into a boss that seems to eat them up, there are few things more annoying in Destiny than when that awful *click* happens as you run out your last mag with no Primary reserves. Bungie has commented as recently as this week’s TWAB (This Week at Bungie) that they want the focus of the game to be on gunplay, with abilities accenting it, and running out of Primary ammo doesn’t support that playstyle.
Over on the DestinyTheGame subreddit, u/NaughtyGaymer proposed the theory that Bungie is planning to retire limited Primary ammo, and instead give players bottomless wells of reserve ammo while using Primary weapons.
Why Players Think Destiny 2 Infinite Primary Ammo is Coming
Their argument hinges on two pieces of evidence. The first is an announcement in a July 1st TWAB about a change to the weapon perk “Drop Mag.” Drop Mag makes reloading the weapon much faster, but you lose any of the existing ammo in the magazine (whereas the default is to just fill in what’s already been fired off without “losing” ammo). “Drop Mag” now no longer rolls as a perk on new weapons, and Bungie said “There’s a change coming next Season that requires adjusting this, and some perks with similar functionality – more on that later…”
Then this week, Bungie announced a number of subclass changes to shake up the sandbox in a big way. One of those was an enormous buff to the Titan’s “Inertia Override” ability, which lets you slide over ammo to immediately reload your equipped weapon and grant a damage buff. The change now increases that duration from 4 seconds to 6 seconds, and gives 20% melee energy to the player. Bungie again here notes “This change will be balanced out by something we haven’t mentioned yet. We’ll say more about this in a future TWAB.”
With these two pieces of evidence, u/NaughtyGaymer says that the only adjustment that makes sense is getting rid of Primary ammo bricks in favor of infinite Primary ammo. Drop Mag’s downside of losing ammo wouldn’t matter if you have infinite reserves, thus the need to change the perk, and a big buff to Inertia Override seems to be compensating for the fact that there won’t be nearly as many ammo bricks on the ground anymore (expected now to just be Special and Heavy ammo drops).
They also note that this change to the ammo economy drastically cleans up the mod experience by removing all Primary ammo mods, and posit that it could potentially help loading by not generating physical Primary ammo bricks that need to be spawned in and tracked within the world. It’s not just as simple as making Primary weapons have endless wells of ammo, however. If true, it will most likely come with a number of other changes to assorted Exotic Weapon and Armor perks that deal with the ammo economy too.
Bungie is expected to talk about Armor and Mod changes for the upcoming Season next week, which may be when they finally officially announce the change. After all, as mentioned, this would remove the need for a huge portion of the mod options that are available, and would certainly warrant talking about at that time.
As a Destiny fan, I’m hoping this is true. While Special and Heavy ammo need to remain limited due to their power, running out of Primary ammo just feels bad in moments that rarely lend any kind of interest or strategy to coming up empty.
Bungie is set to reveal even more about the future of Destiny 2 on August 24th, when they’ll do a livestream for The Witch Queen on the same day that the next Season goes live. The Witch Queen was delayed from an expected late 2021 release to early 2022, shifting the usual cadence of yearly expansions for the game. That also means that the Season kicking off on August 24th will be the longest one yet, potentially running as long as six months instead of the usual three. A leak seemed to indicate there would be a big “Bungie anniversary” winter event—a kind of mini-season to hold players over—but many details in the leak seem a bit farfetched, wishful thinking, or just too good to be true, and much of the evidence points to it being fake. Still, Bungie does need to start talking about how they plan to keep players interested in the interim during the extended Seasonal lull later this year.
[Source: Reddit]
